New technologies are resulting in new ways of selling products including high value products such as vehicles. Sellers are deploying new tools and methods that leverage new technologies to gain a competitive edge.
In a conventional vehicle sales scenario, a potential automobile buyer initiates a purchasing process by visiting a dealership or a dealership web site. However, the dealer maintains potentially unnecessary resources to handle the initial visits to the dealership by a potential automobile buyer. Not knowing whether the potential customer intends to make a purchase, a large number of salespersons stand ready to confront all visitors to the dealership. However, many visits are preliminary and do not require the assistance of a salesperson. Accordingly, inefficiency is often experienced in such a conventional vehicle dealership setting.
New vehicle buyers are also researching vehicles on many auto web sites which provide vehicle sale leads to associated dealerships by forwarding the customer contact information and vehicle interest information to these dealerships. For example, a substantial percentage of car buyers begin their car buying process using the Internet and most of the potential car buyers submit lead information prior to physically visiting a dealership. However, without a lead management system, a dealership may be losing valuable leads, prospects, and sales. Moreover, there is a lead time involved by the time the customer is contacted by the sales staff of the dealership. For example, by the time a sales person from the dealership contacts the potential customer, the customer may have moved on to another vehicle or may have been contacted by another dealership. So the vehicle sale lead would be lost. Thus, the inherent delay in the response time introduces potential lost sales in the vehicle sales process based on leads generated for a dealership from auto web sites.
In view of the drawbacks exemplified in these prior approaches, there is room for innovations and improvements.